Knowledge Base

Citation metrics

These are descriptions of (and information about) the citation metrics available in Invenio.

We currently display the following citation statistics for any group of papers

Total number of citable papers analyzed

This is simply the number of papers from your search that were counted in the HTML citesummary. This is the number used for averages, etc. Other papers may have been found, but may not have been eligible for citation tracking.

Total number of citations

Simply the total number of citations to the papers in your search.

Average citations per paper

The above two numbers as a ratio.

Total number of citations minus self-citations

This is the sum over all papers of the number of citations minus the number of citations to a paper by at least one of the coauthors of any paper. Things to note here:

If you are doing a citesummary for author A, the self-cites for her paper 1 are all papers citing paper 1 written by author A or her co-authors for any paper author A has written.

If there are more than 20 authors on a paper, the collaboration name is used to exclude cites from papers with the same collaboration name. Collaboration is not used for papers under 20 authors. If the paper has more than 20 authors and no collaboration name, only the first 20 authors are used. This will exclude most self citations from that same group, but will miss a few from individual authors later in the list. This is a rare case.

h-index

The h-index (or simply, ‘h’) is defined as the number of papers with citation number higher or equal to h. It is intended as a useful index to characterize the scientific output of a researcher. First proposed by Hirsch in physics/0508025, it is explained better there than here.